Situated between the Victorians and Modernism, the fin de siècle is an exciting and rewarding period to study. In the literature and art of the 1890s, the processes of literary and cultural change can be seen in action. In this, more than any previous decade, literature was an active and controversial participant within debates over morality, aesthetics, politics and science, as Victorian certainties began to break down. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Olive Schreiner were among the most prominent, occasionally even notorious, writers and artists of the period, challenging establishment values and producing a distinctive literature of their own. This volume includes the main currents of radical and innovative thinking in the period, as well as the attempts to resist them. It will be of great interest to students of Victorian and twentieth-century literature, art and cultural history.

"...the essays in the Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siecle crystallize the period's key concepts, influences, and patterns of thought in clear, illuminating, and unusually insightful ways largely free of obfuscating jargon."
-Chris Snodgrass, University of Florida, English Literature in Transition

"As someone who teaches fin de sie`cle courses every semester, I am very pleased to see the publication of The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sie`cle. Finally there is a collection of useful overviews ofmajor topics in the period to which I can direct my students.”
-Talia Schaffer,Queens College and the Graduate Center